Enterprise Billing|Enterprise Billing System|Enterprise Billing Solution|Smart Enterprise Billing|Enterprise Billing management|Enterprise Billing Platform|Enterprise Billing Services

Enterprise Billing Software refers to the pricing, rating or charging of products and/or services offered by growing or established businesses, which typically involve not just the complex billing scenarios but also the high value or high volume transactions that need to be rated or charged accurately by an enterprise-grade billing system.

The enterprise billing typically has a large number of customer accounts or a large number of transactions because of the nature of the business conducted by an organisation. It could be a business with a few hundred B2B customers but millions of billing or rating transactions per day, or it could be a retail business (B2C) with millions of customer accounts.

EarnBill is meant to support enterprise-grade billing and rating requirements. It has multiple technical and functional features that help it scale to the required volumes, at the same time meet most of the functional requirements out of the box. Its configuration and plugins offer enriching functionality.

The technical features that set apart EarnBill as an enterprise billing system involve its ability to be customised easily and to extend the existing functionality, it’s scalability to work with growing volumes, it’s deployment architecture that supports high availability and almost a cent percent up time guarantee. It’s flexible integration options allow it to be integrated with old and new technology stack rather easily and it’s security features makes it safe for the business to operate and depend on.

The following section provides more details of these technical capabilities of the EarnBill.

• • Customised Billing

EarnBill’s technical architecture is designed in such a way that it is much easier to make changes to the application and extend it’s functionality. This is done with plugin based architecture, and this architecture is shown in the diagram below:

As shown in the diagram above, the plugin architecture extends the functionality of the billing core by providing various functional hooks and allowing to “plug in” different functions (such as pricing, rating, mediation, provisioning and more). This allows to extend the application functionality easily. The event manager allows the event handler plugins to tap into various events and thus implement different functions to meet custom requirements.

EarnBill’s plugins are developed using 2 design patterns – the Strategy design pattern and the Chain of Command design pattern. The Strategy design pattern allows it to implement different implementations for a common interface. The Chain of Command design pattern allows it to define multiple plugins to perform a specific function, each of the plugin in the chain performs a distinct function and adds its own value to the outcome.

• • Easy to develop, easy to test

With plugin based architecture, the development is localised to a certain new plugin(s) which is/are introduced to meet the new functionality. It is easier to write unit testing scenarios for such localised functionality and testing is much easier.

• • Quick time-to-market

The plugin based architecture of the EarnBill system allows the launch of new features quickly and seamlessly. Faster development life cycle ensures quick time-to-market. This benefits business as the sales and marketing team can really take advantage and turn their market research based strategies into reality very quickly. This further propels innovation in the organisation as the teams try to come up with new innovative ways to increase the revenue or cut the costs.

• • Deep Configuration

EarnBill provides deep configuration ability. This means that the system functionality and behaviour can be changed to support multiple different functions based on the choices made by the business. This could be pro rata charging related settings, billing process periods, customer address types, various payment methods to name a few as examples.

• • Scalability

EarnBill’s deployment architecture is designed to scale horizontally as well as dynamically.

• • Horizontal Scaling

The deployment architecture allows to add more EarnBill nodes to process more volumes in parallel. Be it transaction processing or batch processing, EarnBill is designed to highly scalable enterprise billing system that can give a solid performance during peak loads. It’s multi node deployment architecture has a robust mechanism to ensure quick transaction times and optimum performance of the system.

• • Dynamic Scaling

EarnBill has been used with cloud based deployments that cater to dynamic scaling. The technical architecture of the transaction processing and batch processing system allow for more nodes being added to the deployment on the fly based on the increasing load on the system. This allows for peak loads to be handled easily without affecting the system performance. If there is not much load on the system during off business hours, the system scales down dynamically to a minimum configuration, saving on cloud costs.

• • High Availability

EarnBill’s deployment architecture caters to the high availability requirements ensuring almost a cent percent up time guarantee. There is a redundant node provided for each service that is involved in transaction processing and batch processing. This ensures that any software or hardware failure, whether from the application side or from the supporting cloud infrastructure side, does not affect the EarnBill service. The system remains available for use.

There are internal alerts triggered to report a system issue to relevant support teams so that they can act and try to recover the failed node in the background. Also, in a limited way, the system nodes also try to recover from a software failure and try to be back up again. This fault tolerance is build into both the technical and deployment architecture of the system. The logging and monitoring system plays an important role to keep tabs on the system and ensure that any issues are logged and reported in a transparent way.

• • Integration

Any enterprise scale system is made of many applications or sub systems. It is very important that systems share data and responsibilities for which they are being used. The EarnBill system integrates with host of other systems such as the CRM system, an EPR system, an accounting system, a network provisioning system and a customer portal among others.

EarnBill provides an easy way to integrate and provides a comprehensive REST API to consume its data and allow the data in the Billing & Revenue Management system to be created and updated. This helps with the workflows such as an account on-boarding, service activation, service cancellation, plan change and others.

• • Large Scale Batch Processing

EarnBill provides the ability to process million of records through its batch processes, designed to process consumption records such as Call Data Records (or CDRs in Telecom), also known as Usage Data Records (UDRs) or metered reads in Energy. EarnBill’s batch jobs are designed to scale horizontally and dynamically. This ensures that increase in volumes does not deter the business in pressing ahead with the business expansion.

The batch jobs are also used for tasks such as invoice generation, sending e-bills, generating paper bills, automated payment collection process, user ageing process and other batch report generation tasks.

• • Security

The enterprise billing systems handle either the high value or the high volume transactions. This requires heightened level of security at various levels to ensure that the entire ecosystem is foolproof and that the crucial consumer data and their financial records are stored securely. EarnBill is designed and developed with secure features and follows the industry best practices with respect to meeting various compliance requirements as well as security practices.  At present, the systems are ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II compliant.

EarnBill ensures secured deployment of the system whether on premise or on cloud. The application is designed with a role based and a function based access control. The system design and development process follows Secure Coding practices with a Secured SDLC.

The functional features that make EarnBill an Enterprise Billing platform include those features that allow the system to scale in supporting different business offerings, support different products and services, offer multi country support with support for different languages, currencies and taxation. Also, features such as wholesaler-reseller support, billing mediation and automated payment processing makes it a system that can cater to many business requirements across multiple business domains.

• • Complex Billing

Earnbill makes it easy to implement complex business rules, be it different types of pricing calculations, pro rata charging, more complexity in rate cards, or complex integration based workflow. EarnBill can cater to all requirements that require extending it’s features and functionalities. This can be done by using it’s plugin based architecture that also includes event handler plugin category, which makes it very easy to avoid impact on existing system features and plug in a new feature rather easily.

• • Multi Tenant System

EarnBill is a multi-tenant system with a company hierarchy feature that allows the businesses to map their different departments/sub-companies/product offerings as distinct revenue making bodies (or cost centres). This feature allows the business to make revenue management decentralised by each sub company, at the same time keep flexibly the financial reporting or certain batch processes such as consumption billing and charging centralised.

This feature avoids having to buy multiple enterprise billing licenses and support your entire business with just one EarnBill license.

• • Multi Country Support

An enterprise billing platform such as EarnBill makes it easy and convenient to configure the system with various currencies, languages and tax plugins to suit requirements in any country.

• • Multi Currency Support

Set up multiple currencies with ease. It is possible to maintain currency exchange rates in the system and update them if there are cross currency transactions taking place in the business.

• • Multi Lingual Support

EarnBill provides simple language resource bundles that makes it easy and convenient to meet different language requirements, even support different languages within the same instance of EarnBill in a multi tenant system.

• • Multi Country Tax support

Each country can have it’s own tax rules. EarnBill has been implemented in many countries and supports various types of taxes such as Sales Tax, Goods and Services Tax (GST) and VAT.

• • Wholesaler-Reseller Model Support

If business has many resellers and need to track their sales in the system, EarnBill is just the right system for such requirement. It’s Company Hierarchy feature makes it convenient to set up the Wholesaler – Reseller model as different companies in a hierarchy. It allows defining parent – child relationship amongst entities that allow different visibility into the revenue data.

• • Secured Payment Processing

EarnBill has been used for automated payment processing requirements in many countries and provides out-of-the-box payment plugins for a dozen different payment gateways across the world. It’s designed for collecting the payments in a secure manner and meets the PCI DSS requirements for carrying out payments.

EarnBill’s Enterprise Billing edition has been designed to meet complex billing requirements for both growing and established businesses. It’s key advantages are the following –

1. 1. It’s flexibility to be customized to meet the complex billing requirements
   2. It’s deep configuration ability that meets vast functionality out-of-the-box
   3. It’s technical design that makes it easy and convenient to extend it’s functionality
   4. The ability to scale to growing volumes both horizontally and dynamically
   5. It’s wide area coverage in meeting functional billing requirements
   6. The multi tenancy, multi country support
   7. The support for the Enterprise Billing features such as Billing Mediation and Secured Payment Processing